Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#1

Post by mspaulding06 » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:00 PM UTC

At my company I'm considering switching us from Nagios to another monitoring system and starting to do some research. What's the best monitoring solution out there today? I'm pretty impressed by Prometheus, but just like to get some more opinions.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#2

Post by shofetim » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:04 PM UTC

Prometheus is the clear winner

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#3

Post by random55643 » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:04 PM UTC

Sensu!

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#4

Post by ninjakeyboard » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:06 PM UTC

I think it depends on your needs and software, how much time you want to invest, what you want to monitor, do you want to maintain it or you want saas?

You want metrics from counters you build in your app? (see statsd?)

You want to aggregate and do analysis on logs? (see ELK stack?)

You want to monitor cloud infrastructure (see stackdriver?)

You want to run end to end tests on your application to ensure it's behaving? (see runscope?)

As your application grows, you probably want a blend of tools to see inside your app.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#5

Post by falcolas » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:08 PM UTC

Just my opinion, but I won't use Prometheus, because of the active polling model. It won't scale without a number of workarounds.

My preferred method is Icinga2 (a Nagios clone with better configuration and clustering built-in) with reports coming in via passive NSCA. Toss in Graphite (or I'm warming up to Grafana on Influx) with some ability to write alerts against those reported metrics, and you're as close to ideal as I can come up with.

Of course, that requires a fair bit of up-front knowledge to stand up and operate, but they're so rock solid (and scale like mad) I have a hard time not recommending them.